FalconStor releases IPStor 6.0

Posted on April 17, 2008

—FalconStor Software announced this week that it is taking a new tack toward selling its data-protection software with a round of upgrades as well as a change in its selling strategy that will see its IPStor technology sold as separate products rather than as a single software suite.

FalconStor has enhanced IPStor in the areas of disaster recovery, business continuance, and virtual server support and is now selling its software as three separate products: Network Storage Server (NSS), Continuous Data Protector (CDP), and Virtual Tape Library (VTL).

New to the overall platform is so-called "thin disaster recovery," which extends the concept of thin provisioning to data mirroring and replication and eliminates the need for identical storage allocations at the data center and the disaster-recovery site.

FalconStor's Thin DR feature uses the IPStor platform to replicate data to and from any heterogeneous storage array, and the company's MicroScan technology with data de-duplication and compression minimizes the amount of data transferred at the disk-sector level. Users can create a virtual volume to match the size of each data provisioning request and allocate a smaller amount of actual physical disk space, assigning additional physical space automatically as needed.

Version 6 of the IPStor platform also enables the construction of disk-based data-protection storage appliances using off-the-shelf components to create a virtual appliance integrated with the VMware ESXi virtual server infrastructure. Building a virtual appliance with IPStor lets small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) create a virtual backup server for data recovery and business continuity purposes.

Diamond Lauffin, a product strategist with FalconStor, says the company has compartmentalized its CDP, VTL, and virtualization technologies to eliminate confusion around its software capabilities and clearly define its products in the minds of partners and end-user customers.

"By offering three discreet products rather than an umbrella IPStor software suite we're able to focus on three areas: iSCSI SANs, VTLs, and CDP," Lauffin explains. "It's less confusing for integrators and users."

Lauffin says the IPStor platform will still be offered as a software suite. "IPStor can still be combined as a suite, but trying to be all things to all people doesn't always work as a strategy."

The NSS, CDP, and VTL applications can be purchased as software-only products or embedded in pre-configured hardware appliances.

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